Month: March 2017

It’s a little after 8 a.m. at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., and Michelle Harris’ AP Environmental Science class is getting right to it.

“All right, you guys got your brackets out?” Harris asks.

The class of mostly juniors and seniors ruffle through folders and pull out pieces of paper with brackets — 64 slots, four quadrants, and one central box to predict the championship. But there’s something a little different about these brackets …

“We’re going to jump down to the fourth-seeded spider monkey against the 12th-seeded antelope squirrel,” Harris says.

“Spider monkey better win!” one student shouts from the back of the class.

This is March Mammal Madness: Round 2. It’s a competition that has been playing out online and in hundreds of classrooms over the past month. Real animals wage fictional battles, while students use science — a lot of it — to try to predict the winner.

March Mammal Madness was created five years ago by Katie Hinde, an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University, though now, she says, the competition depends on a whole team of volunteer scientists and conservationists: biologists, animal behaviorists, paleoanthropologists, marine biologists.

Hinde’s team meets every year for a Selection Sunday of its own. Team members pick the animals that will compete and even decide who will win, though they keep it a secret. That’s because a whole lot of research has to be done.

Each scientist is assigned a specific battle, then studies up and writes a battle story based on facts.

“Then the battles are live-tweeted as a dynamic, play-by-play story, much like someone would watch a basketball game,” Hinde says.

Those tweets link to scientific articles, videos, photos, fossil records — whatever the team can use to drop knowledge into the story. That’s why so many teachers, including Michelle Harris, have begun using the brackets in class.

As in basketball, there are plenty of upsets and broken hearts — like the time a snow leopard and a flying squirrel faced off in the rain forest. The snow leopard overheated and lost. Or the time tourists used their human junk food to lure an adorable quokka off the playing field.

“Sometimes animals can displace one another. Sometimes animals can hide, animals can run away. Sometimes they get eaten. Sometimes they actually engage in contact aggression,” Hinde says.

It’s a little ridiculous, but she says the point is to have fun while also creating a learning opportunity.

“We really try to showcase animals that people might never have heard of,” she says. “Like dhole and bandicoot and binturong and babirusa.”

At Wakefield High, Michelle Harris is going over the tweets from one of the previous night’s battles: the No. 6 seed tiger versus the No. 3 seed leopard seal.

“And apparently we need to bundle up,” she tells the class, “because we’re headed to the vast coastal ice flows of Antarctica!”

Near the back of the class, senior Jordan Simpson giggles with Tiara Jones, both looking at a computer screen. They’ve Googled the bilby, a tiny Australian marsupial with big, rabbitlike ears. Simpson says she picked it to go all the way.

“I thought it was cute,” she says with a laugh. “I knew it had no chance, but I thought I’d give it a shot.”

Jones bursts out laughing. The bilby was ousted in the first round by a Tibetan sand fox.

Harris says those fits of giggles are a big reason she uses the bracket in class.

“This time of year can be a little stressful as we’re leading up to AP exams, so it’s nice to have a little bit of fun along the way,” she says.

That’s Hinde’s ultimate goal, too — to make science fun.

“I think it’s a chance to return to that time when science was all about the imagination and the wonder at the natural world,” she says. “Science is narrative, and that is incredibly salient to the human mind.”

My last and final Write 6×6 post of 2017 goes out to Alisa Cooper and everyone at the Glendale Community College Center for Teaching, Learning & Engagement (CTLE).

Thank you all for encouraging us to write about our educational experiences not to mention offering all the other amazing activities and events you do throughout the year. You have made a difference for me and always set a good example for others to follow. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for enriching the culture of Glendale Community College.

Academic advisors on our campus work under a great deal of pressure and for the most part go largely unrecognized for the good work they do. There aren’t enough of us to go around, and very few on campus understand the volume of information needed to be an educated and effective advisor, not to mention the breadth of skills we must hone and use on a daily basis. Research indicates that the relationship between students and advisors has a significant correlation to student success, nonetheless, academic advisors at GCC are not sufficiently appreciated.

With waits frequently exceeding an hour or two to see an advisor, everyone does their best to help students in the shortest time possible. Despite the challenge of time constraints, it is my belief that the most important part of an advisement conversation begins with an understanding of each student’s motivation for being in college. If you want them to be successful, you need to know where they are coming from and where they want to end up.

My advice to those new to academic advisement is to start advisement sessions with a few important questions. It isn’t enough to simply ask what you can help them with today, they often don’t really know what they don’t know. For example the young woman who came in to ask for Nursing courses. I could have given her a schedule of classes and never known that the student really loved Math but was going into Nursing because her mother thought that would be the best and most secure career. It took quite a bit of effort on my part to encourage this young woman to explore another possibility and to discover that most people with a degree in Mathematics make more than nurses and love their work. In part, because I took the time to ask and to listen, that student is now at ASU and a very happy Math major.

Students need someone in their corner. It isn’t easy to understand higher education pathways especially when students tend to be given inaccurate or incomplete information at almost every level of transition. Most are confused and not sure who to trust. As a result, I do my best to teach advisees how to verify information I offer and to show them options so that they can make an informed choice that reflects their own best interests.

One last thing, I’ve found that treating students as if they were a friend or family member allows me to keep focus and do a better job advising. I try my best to give them all a VIP experience. Going the extra mile does not make me the fastest advisor on campus, but I see my fair share and know that I’m helping in a meaningful way. Even if others on campus haven’t a clue how hard I work, I know for sure that my students are aware and appreciative. And isn’t that what really matters? Go Gauchos!

Unlike typical flying car concepts, the Pop.Up features a modular set-up that will allow it to operate both on ground and in the air. A drivable passenger capsule, about the size of a smart car, can attach to a giant quadcopter that will lift it into the air, giving passengers the option to travel through the traffic or above it.

The plan is for the Pop.Up to be controlled by Artificial Intelligence so that passengers can summon the vehicle on demand via an app. Airbus sees this as the most efficient way to ferry passengers. It would also the first fully electric, zero-emission vehicle system designed specifically to relieve traffic congestion, which is expected to increase by 2030.

This vehicle is design to meet the needs of the future, explained Italdesign CEO Jörg Astalosch in a press release.

“Today, automobiles are part of a much wider eco-system: if you want to design the urban vehicle of the future, the traditional car cannot alone be the solution for megacities,” Astalosch said. “In the next years ground transportation will move to the next level and from being shared, connected and autonomous it will also go multimodal and moving into the third dimension.”

While the Pop.Up is still in the concept stage, Italdesign and Airbus argue that it is the most feasible concept car to date. If the companies’s hopes come to fruition, it won’t be long before we see their vehicle on our roads and in the skies.

In the spring of 2015, GCC advisors were asked to develop proposals for new models of advising we believed would improve our services to students. To my knowledge and dismay, none of the models gained any traction. It was an extremely valuable exercise that allowed us to reflect and determine how we would change advising at GCC if given the opportunity.

The group I participated in developed a proposal for a new model called Collaborative Advising. The model centers around stronger connections between advisement and academic departments, specialized advising, and strategic use of technological resources.

Along comes Guided Pathways, a growing national conversation in community colleges about improving student experience and completion. Everything about Guided Pathways strengthens the case for Collaborative Advising. Maybe the model deserves a second look.